Growing algae with an Arduino

We’ve seen automated grow boxes of all shapes and sizes, but all were for growing plants. [Jared] over at Inventgeek wanted to do something similar for his algae. He started off with an Arduino-based solution that allows the controlled pulse of LEDs connected to his standard bioreactor as a prototype. Once he determined his proof of concept worked, he began work on a design based on the Arduino Pro Mini that has more advanced features such as temperature monitoring and algae culture density monitoring via some fancy IR voodoo. The code is open source and the hardware is easily obtainable, all that remains is the desire to grow algae.

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So I’m one of the hobbyist people, have been for years. Started with some x in 1 project kits using discrete parts, picked up a micro a while ago when I did in fact get tired of building resistor and cap circuits with the odd transistor tossed in, and spending too much time checking for bad wire jumpers and parts I didn’t know I killed on a previous experiment. It may be amusing to note that most of the discrete circuits I built blinked LEDs in one form or another. I’m having fun and doing odd things, which is my goal. Please don’t assume I should follow your path if I have no intention of getting to the same place you are.

Just picked up a (used, 70’s era) oscilloscope to better measure PWM signals. Great tool, set me back a few dollars. If I had to get that, a logic analyzer, function generator, etc before understanding the basics I had to teach myself (some people have professors, I had the internet and radio shack) I’d probably have broken tools and an abandoned hobby. As it is, using a micro let me have a little block on my breadboard I could tell what to do, and hook other things up to a known central point to play with. After I learned to program the thing, at least.

Anyway, if you hate microcontrollers that much, rejoice. Us novices are happily destroying thousands of them a year to our learning curves, removing their evil from the world… and we aren’t hiking the price of your lab tools to do it.

no one hate uC, sometimes their implementation just looks wrong, like seeing kids playing football with load of bread, you not starving neither you know anyone starving and bread cost less than ball but it continue to look wrong.

No one brainwash me yet, I just too cheap when it come to parts(opposite to tools), and there is no much useful uC in old VCR’s to reuse. And those uC I bought I better use for something more useful than blinkers, same I advice to others

fuck the arduino. Every asshole I know that claims to know about electronics throws around their fuckin arduinos and Zigbees and claim to be the next fuckin davinci. Heh, I guess I started out simple, aka the Basic Stamp, but at least I learned to fuckin move on and actually learn some shit.